


i love it when you try to save me

by chuplayswithfire



Series: tell me why it's wrong [1]
Category: Animorphs - Katherine A. Applegate
Genre: F/M, Fandom Trumps Hate 2020, Gen, Mentioned Rachel/Tobias, Rachel Lives, Time Travel, Time Travel Fix-It
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-18 18:01:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,864
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28871238
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chuplayswithfire/pseuds/chuplayswithfire
Summary: Did I matter?YES. YOU WERE BRAVE. YOU WERE STRONG. YOU WERE GOOD. YOU MATTEREDYeah. Okay, then. Okay, then…A small strand of space-time coiled into nothingness, shedding light and collapsing into darkness. All was nothing, and nothing was all.Rachel died.And then she woke up in her own bed, in a home she never thought she'd return to, a week before the start of it all. Maybe someone else would avoid the fight, the war, the early death waiting for her at the end - maybe if Rachel were smarter, if she had an ounce more of self-preservation, that's what she would do.But the war is here, is a part of Rachel, and it will not be won without the Animorphs.
Series: tell me why it's wrong [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2117286
Comments: 19
Kudos: 59
Collections: Fandom Trumps Hate 2020





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [juurensha](https://archiveofourown.org/users/juurensha/gifts).



> Written as part of Fandom Trumps Hate 2020, for the prompt: "After her death in Book 54, Rachel wakes up at the beginning of the series, before she's even gotten the morphing power. With her memories of how the events of Animorphs played out, she tries to make a better future."
> 
> Parts of this story refer directly to the wording/phrasing of Book 1: The Encounter
> 
> Title is from 1950 by King Princess, as part of my favorite set of lyrics in the song - "I hate it when dudes try to chase me/I love it when you try to save me". I've been vibing to that song all month.

_Did I matter?_

YES. YOU WERE BRAVE. YOU WERE STRONG. YOU WERE GOOD. YOU MATTERED. 

_Yeah. Okay, then. Okay, then…_

A small strand of space-time coiled into nothingness, shedding light and collapsing into darkness. All was nothing, and nothing was all. 

And then the strand, so tightly wound and compressed that it had become nothing, was tugged free as all around it other strands grew, glowed, and became the reset pieces of a familiar game board. 

YOU ARE NOT SATISFIED WITH THE ENDING? THEN LET US PLAY AGAIN. AND AS THE WINNER, I WILL CLAIM MY ADVANTAGE. 

00000000

Rachel woke, her face sinking into suffocating darkness, movement of her limbs restricted by a length of what must have been some sort of thick, heavy fabric. Her heart raced. Her lungs seized, contracted small enough that air would not fill them, no matter how she gasped. Her own hair was wound about her neck, her face, and she had to struggle free an arm enough to yank the hair back to where it belonged. 

She forced herself to breathe. Forced herself to sit up. Forced herself to remain silent, as she realized the suffocating softness had been a pillow, a bed, that the imprisoning fabric was a comforter. That she was in an impossible place, with impossible familiarity, because this room had been as thoroughly destroyed as she was. 

Her hands shook as she thought, and clenching them into fists did little to stop that. _I'm dead_ , she thought to herself, refusing to think of herself as hysterical, no matter how panicked the thought was. _The yeerk killed me._

She remembered it with terrible clarity - not death, but the taste of blood in her mouth, the crunch of scales between her teeth, the look of devastation on Tobias' face and the stricken resolution on Jake's. The almost reverent tone of the yeerk's voice before he struck -

She couldn't have survived that, and even if she could have, it wouldn't have brought her back to this place, to her childhood bedroom, with the posters of Olympic gymnasts she had admired once and boy bands she hadn't felt a drive to listen to in years, posters that had ripped to shreds when the ceiling gave and dragged parts of the walls down with it. The pink shag rug that she used to lay on to do her homework was still there, when it had been torn apart by the bulk of her elephant form and the separation of the floorboards. 

Her childhood bedroom, and most of the house, had been remodeled completely, changed from the way it had been to the way her mother had always wanted it to be, at cost of the contractors who had originally built it, contractors who couldn't explain the destruction that had followed her morph with anything but baffled acceptance of fault to avoid a lawsuit her mother would have won. 

That had been years ago. Not even a full year into the war, and this was impossible. A trick. 

But when she tried to morph, she couldn't. The feeling wasn't there, the transition, the change, none of it. When she stood to investigate the room, the impossible calendar of N'Sync was flipped to May, 1997, the dates leading to what had to be the present day circled and crossed out with red X’s. If she remembered it right - and she knew she did - it was the Monday before they walked into that construction site.

It was a personal habit a yeerk could have found out from infesting her, but what yeerk would bother with this elaborate charade, when it could learn anything it wanted by making a screaming puppet out of her? What yeerk would have bothered to learn all this and leave her uninfested?

It didn't make sense.

Rachel wandered from her room and through the rest of the house. She watched Jordan and Sara sleep in their beds, the bedroom that they had stopped sharing two years ago still filled with their shared toys. She pulled the blankets up on her mom's sleeping form, closed the still open case file on her nightstand. She walked the ground floor, and the old kitchen, the one that still looked like her memories of _before_ \- before the war, where once before had meant before the divorce. 

She didn't make this up. She couldn't have made it up, she couldn't have _dreamed up_ three years of hell, but it's all - gone. The height she'd gained, the soft smoothness of her hands from constant morphing dissolving her calluses, the room, the _house_ , all the evidence is gone, and yet - and yet -

She used to think aliens were impossible, and that shape changing was something out of dorky comic books. She used to think that wars were big, impossible to hide things that would happen to other people. She used to think she was a good person, a _really_ good person, not just someone who was friends with good people. 

Against all of that, why wouldn't time travel be real? Why would it be a nightmare, when it could just as easily be another impossibility made real? 

She considered yelling for the Ellimist, the only being she could imagine would make this happen, but only for a moment, before deciding against it. She was no Tobias (and oh, the thought of him made her heart clench), no impossible son of Elfangor. He'd done the impossible for her already - or someone else had, and that idea, once considered, was even worse. 

Being in Crayak's debt - no. She wouldn't be in his debt, and she didn't care what he would say otherwise. ( She does not question it, this certainty that Crayak and not the Ellimist had to be responsible. Rachel had learned to stop questioning her gut. Nothing and no one was reliable, so she would be. She would trust herself even if no one else would. )

She didn't ask for this. 

She _didn't_ ask for this. 

"I didn't ask for this," she told her ceiling, and her teeth were bared, lips pulled back over canines that would never be as impressive as those of the bear she'd stolen the expression from. "But I'll use it."

00000000

Morning arrived in stages, and Rachel was awake to witness them all. 

First, the exhaustion of her body, as the house tipped past four and the need for sleep hit with all the uncaring brutality of a Taxxon charging. Hormones, she remembered. Cassie had told them once, as they morphed into moles, one after the other, and tunneled into the pitch grip of the unforgiving earth. Hormones, and the rhythm of the body. 

Second, was the change of the sky as the sun climbed it. A wash of yellow, and then orange after it, as the dark of night gave way to a sunrise. It wasn't the first she'd greeted in this fashion, laying under blankets that threatened to suffocate, her face turned from the door and to the window. It was open. Tobias wouldn't be coming, she knew, but that she knew that he was tucked away in some corner of his deadbeat uncle's house couldn't overwrite three years of muscle memory, of experience. Tobias wouldn't be coming. 

But just in case. 

Third, the final stage, was that her door burst open, thrown wide with such strength that it bounced off the wall with a slam. Was the scream of, "WAKE UP SLEEPYHEAD!" that resounded from Jordan's lungs with all the force of a megaphone. Was the _thud-thud-thud_ of her footsteps as she ran to Rachel's bed and threw herself on it. Was her irritated groan and the whump of her sister's body knocking the wind from her lungs as she pretended to be shocked out of a dead sleep. 

( Once, and only once, Rachel had thrown her sister from the bed for this. She had woken to the sound of shouting and thudding steps and _reacted_ and one sister had stared from the floor and the other from the door with identical faces of fear. She hadn't known it at the time, but the sound that had torn from her lips had been a roar, an animal sound of threat. Only the fact that the war was young and she was still slow and unskilled allowed her haphazard morph to grizzly to go unnoticed, the fur climbing up her back and the disjointed bones of her legs hidden by blankets and pajamas. )

"You little _brat_ ," she forced from her lips in the present, as she forced tears to stay behind her eyes. The last time she saw her sisters was in the Hork-Bajir Valley, left behind with the young and the defenseless. She didn't know how the war ended. She didn't know if Jordan - it didn't matter. The Rachel that Jordan knew wouldn't have cried, so she didn't. She just said, the words ash on her tongue. "You’re dead when I catch you."

And her sisters were too young to think about the lack of heat in her tone, especially when she lunged to her feet and chased them all the way down the stairs. Her mother yelled, of course, but in a laughing way Rachel hadn't heard in years. Even before the war was public, her home had been a battleground. 

The thought stayed with her, through breakfast and a rushed shower, through dressing and rolling her eyes and allowing her mother to drop her off at school. 

On the other side of the car windows, the world looked the same as it ever had, and better than it had been at the end. It looked normal, and every person they passed could be a yeerk. 

( Not literally. At this point in the invasion, the yeerk forces were spread out still, spreading around the Earth like a disease, and even if the pool was _here_ , it was the Animorphs - the _Andalite Bandits_ \- that would later make them concentrate their forces so heavily. 

Those facts did nothing to slow the rush of adrenaline. It wasn't paranoia if they were really out to get you. )

Getting to school was better, and worse, all at once. There were people, at school, all around. talking and shouting and laughing and whispering, going about their everyday lives as if nothing was the matter, and most of them stared at her. Of course they did. Even at thirteen she was tall and pretty and blond, dressed more like a model than another teenage girl, and she was _popular_ , she was Rachel Berenson who did gymnastics at the mall, she was Rachel Berenson whose cousin Tom played basketball at the high school, she was Rachel Berenson the straight A student who had it all. 

It was impossible to walk ten feet without running into someone who knew her, someone she had known once and forgotten when the war made things like other friends irrelevant. 

For the first time she considered that she didn't know how to do this.

And then she saw him - Tobias.

He didn't see her - he wasn't looking her way, was digging in his locker with his back to her, but she recognized the wispiness of his blond hair and the shape of him, and for a moment, everything the war had taught her about lying and pretending, about faking normality and not rocking the boat, was gone. She just saw Tobias, one of five people she most wanted to see in the world right now, and went straight to him. 

"Tobias," she called, and at least had the brains to keep it quiet, no louder than the rest of the chatter around her. 

He jumped like a spooked rabbit, whipped around to stare at her with wide blue eyes. His face was soft and slack with surprise, open with a kind of effortless expressiveness she'd long forgotten he'd been capable of. 

The recognition in his eyes didn't diminish the surprise and confusion.

"Uh - were you talking to me, R-Rachel?" He asked, equal parts nervous and disbelieving, suspicious. 

He didn't remember. He didn't remember anything at all. She'd been stupid to think he would, and she felt stupid now, staring down at him. She'd forgotten that Tobias used to look lost and shy at school, that the chip on his shoulder hadn't just come from his crummy homelife and living as a hawk in the middle of a forest. He liked her. She knew that - she'd known that even before they walked through that construction site, because his eyes, those dreamy blue eyes, followed her when she was in the halls. 

But she'd never done anything about it - never _thought_ of doing anything about it, back then. Back... now, as the Rachel she was supposed to be right now.

They weren't friends. They _aren_ 't friends, because - 

This wasn't her Tobias. 

Grief hit, and frustration with it, and she felt the way her face spasmed, the way her face scrunched before she could get herself under control. Tobias stepped back and collided with his locker, because there was nowhere else to go. 

He was nervous. 

Was he scared of her? Even now, when she was like this?

He'd never been scared of her before, had he? She couldn’t remember. The thought made her stomach drop. 

"Never mind," she bit out, and hurried down the hall. He didn't call after her, but she felt his eyes, staring. 

00000000

"What was that about?" Cassie asked the second Rachel sat down in her usual spot at the desk to Cassie's right. 

"What was what about?" 

It was a weak defense, and Rachel knew it, and Cassie knew it, and she was entirely counting on Cassie's general niceness to mean that she wouldn't push it, because Rachel honestly didn't know what she'd say if her friend _did_ push.

Because the fact that all Cassie had to say to her was a question about Tobias meant that Cassie knew just as much as he did, which was nothing. It meant that she was probably alone here in the past, because Tobias and Cassie were the weirdness magnets on their team, Tobias who was actually Elfangor's time travelled son who only still existed because of the Ellimist's interference and Cassie who'd once been possessed by an Andalite turned Hork Bajir nothlit, and if neither of _them_ remembered the way things had been - no one would. She wasn't going to get her hopes up about Jake and Marco.

Ax probably wasn't even stuck at the bottom of the ocean yet. Elfangor wasn't even _dead_ yet.

What was she supposed to do? They wouldn't cross the construction site for another three days and -

It struck her then, as she stared at the Cassie sitting next to her in silence, the Cassie who'd never betrayed them because she thought she knew better, the Cassie who'd never done brain surgery because she was the only one of them left and they couldn't trust a doctor, the Cassie who'd never trapped herself as a butterfly to prove a stupidly selfish _selfless_ point to a stupid, awful yeerk, who'd never -

Who'd never left her the dirty work for an awful plan, or almost died to protect a group of baby skunks, or -

Stared at Cassie who'd always been her best friend in spite of all of that, who hated the war, the violence, the death, who'd realized before all the rest of them that things were never going to be normal again. 

The yeerks were here. She was sure of that, as sure as she was of the fact that it wasn't a dream. They were going to crash Elfangor's ship. 

He was going to die again. Ax was going to get trapped under the ocean, the only survivor. There wasn't a thing she could do to change any of that. 

What mattered was whether or not they were going to be there when it happened. If she was going to _let them_ be there when it happened.

If they didn't walk through that construction site -

( Rachel would go. There was not a world where she wouldn't, and if the war had taught her anything it was that. The war was a part of her, and she would not let it go, not now that she didn't know who she was without the war, the danger, the death, the rage underneath her skin. 

Would the others? )

If they didn't walk through that construction site, the Earth would be done for, and if she went alone, she'd be done for first, and then Earth would _still_ be done for. 

So the question wasn't 'were they going', but 'was she telling the others what she knew', and Rachel - 

" _Rachel!_ " 

\- nearly jumped out of her skin, her eyes gone wide. She snapped her gaze back to Cassie.

Cassie was frowning at her, the frown that said she was mentally picking Rachel apart, thinking about everything she knew and thought she knew and might not know when it came to her best friend and figuring out how it fit into the puzzle in front of her. 

A part of Rachel was surprised to see that frown - her changes, her warrior princess attitude, it had come out in the war, but she knew it had always been there, buried deep. But Cassie was different. Cassie was the one who still _cared_ about what was right and wrong, who harped on it, who took risks to try and prove that she wasn't like Rachel what the war had brought out of her. Cassie was the one who said the war changed them. To see that look in her eyes, the one that belonged in a huddle in the barn, dissecting yeerk motives, here in their classroom days before they’d known about the war -

It felt strange. It felt wrong. A vulnerability she hadn’t expected and didn’t know how to deal with.

"Are you feeling alright?" 

“Of course I am,” Rachel snapped, and regretted it, because this Cassie hadn’t done anything to deserve that, and because the Rachel she was supposed to be would have needed a lot more than this to lose her temper, and especially because Cassie was _staring_ at her now. She’d been suspicious before and it was worse now. 

It was too easy to come up with a lie. It was even easier to look down and rub at the back of her neck guiltily - she _did_ feel guilty, and she _didn’t_ want to look Cassie in the eye while she lied. Mostly because she wasn’t sure Cassie wouldn’t figure her out in a heartbeat.

"Jordan decided to wake me up by jumping on top of me,” she grumbled, pulling her lips into a scowl. “Wake up sleepyhead my butt, she’s lucky I didn’t catch her.”

Cassie laughed, the concern melting off her face, then quickly clapped a hand to her mouth to stifle the sound. She snuck a glance to the front of the room, where the teacher was still taking attendance, and didn't drop her hand until it was clear the woman was paying no heed to their whispered conversation. Only then did she look over to Rachel and ask furtively,

“She’s still doing that?”

“Still doing that. I have no idea when she’s going to stop.” Rachel rolled her eyes, pretending she was as annoyed as she was making herself sound. She did know when Jordan would stop; not the exact day maybe, but the general time, and she knew it wasn't going to happen this time around. She'd put up with being belly flopped awake every morning if it meant her little sister wasn't afraid of her. Even if that meant she never got any real sleep again. That wouldn't be anything new. 

It was almost easy, after that, to let the conversation melt away from Jordan to the homework assignment they had to turn in (that Rachel had been grateful to find in her backpack when she finally dug into it), to - 

“Hey. Wanna go to the mall this weekend?”

00000000

It happened so fast.

Rachel had forgotten so much of that night in the construction site, the details of before and after washed away by the weight of everything that had happened in the middle. It hadn’t mattered, before - if she’d thought about it, it would have only been long enough to say, _well duh_ , because the start of it had been an ordinary day at the mall and the end of it might have been running for her life, but the middle of it…

The middle of it all was a spaceship. Elfangor, weirdly delicate and powerful all at once. A warning echoing in her head. _ < They have come to destroy you. > _

A blue box that shocked, but not in a way that hurt. 

Her first sight of yeerk controllers - hork-bajir, taxxons.

_Visser Three._

Elfangor’s dying cry, echoing in her head. The first person she'd ever seen die. Not the last. Not by a long shot.

Running for her life and realizing that Jake had fallen behind. Running without him, just because he told her too. Running and running and running until she was home and shaking and stuttering out a lie as she ran upstairs and tried to tell herself it was all a dream -

This time, she knew she would remember all of it. It would be hard not to, when she was the one organizing everything, the one to make sure that she and Cassie were shopping, the way she remembered it, to double check that Jake and Marco were at the arcade, to - 

Rachel didn’t actually have a way to make sure Tobias was there, but he was. He was. 

“You shouldn’t go through the construction site by yourselves.” Jake had said. That was how it started. “I mean, being girls and all.” 

It was she didn’t miss about this weird, fake-peaceful time - being underestimated by the people who should have known her best. She’d never liked it, being looked down on like she was weak just because she was a girl, but there was something especially annoying about it coming from Jake, Jake who knew exactly what she was and what she was like and understood her better than anyone, maybe even better than herself. Jake who sent her to do the one thing she and only she could do. 

So she’d snapped something back and before she knew it, Cassie was chiming in that actually, she’d appreciate it if they walked back together, and there they were. Five mall rats, heading home, through the abandoned construction site. Used to be, her mother thought that place was the worst thing about their town. A lawsuit waiting to happen because it was too dangerous. Some kid was going to get hurt. 

Her mom had known better by the end of it, but in a way, she hadn’t been all wrong. 

Elfangor’s ship crashing down in the middle of that construction site had gotten a lot of kids hurt, if you thought about it.

Rachel hadn’t been able to think about much more than that for the last three days. The war. The construction site. The ship. The blue box. 

She had to make sure she took the blue box. She had to make sure it went home with her, and then that it was hidden away somewhere no one but the six of them would ever find it. No Davids, this time and no Cassie to give away the morphing power either. Rachel didn’t exactly have a plan for how she was going to make sure everything didn’t go belly up this time, but she had at least a few ideas of what _not_ to do.

Elfangor’s ship appeared in the sky and somehow a part of her brain still lit up in awe seeing it. Never mind she’d literally been in space and never mind she knew Bugfighters would be coming any minute. There was still, even now, maybe especially now, something awe-inspiring about it, that ship, deceptively small and almost cute looking besides that andalite tail-like blaster at the end. It was just like she remembered. 

_Just_ like she remembered, which meant that everything she remembered was for sure, for real, the future. 

Okay, okay, okay. 

“We should tell someone,” Marco said, and he wasn’t moving an inch, staring at the ship, his eyes huge and his hair still standing on end from the rush of Elfangor’s ship zipping overhead. “I mean, this is kind of major, you know? Spaceships don’t just land in the construction site every day. We should call the cops or the army or the president or something. We’d be totally famous. We’d be on Letterman for sure.”

Rachel was pretty sure David Letterman wasn't a controller. They didn't really _get_ humor. But she was also pretty sure he was an idiot so she felt justified in saying, "David Letterman's the best you can come up with?"

It was fun to get Marco's goat, okay?

The humor quickly faded though, as the ship finally, finally landed and it was impossible to see inside, the tail of it at a low angle, disarmed for the moment, she’d guess. She couldn’t remember if Elfangor had used that ship to fight back. She couldn’t remember if he’d fought back at all. She stared at the ship. Her hands were shaking - her whole body was shaking, she realized, swallowing hard. The war was real. It had always been real. 

But now it was - 

real.

Tobias stepped forward, the way she suddenly remembered he always had, the first to step forward and accept what was happening to them. The person who'd needed an escape the most and who'd found it in being an Animorph. Tobias, saying that he wasn’t going to hurt them, whoever they were.

And then his voice was in her head, warm and gentle and _kind_ , a voice she'd only heard for a few minutes that had changed her entire life, and Rachel was furiously biting back tears. 

<I know.>

It was like hearing the voice of a friend she’d always known. Confidence and compassion, gentle. She wasn’t the only one tearing up - in the light of Elfangor’s ship she could see that Jake, Marco, Cassie, Tobias - all of them were tearing up too. Their faces were split with grins, awed as they looked at the ship and Elfangor and they weren’t tearing up for the reason she was, but at least no one would think twice about it. G-d, but she wasn’t ready for this. 

“Can you come out?” Tobias asked in that same loud, reassuring, I-am-talking-to-aliens voice. 

<Yes. Do not be frightened.>

“We won’t be frightened,” Tobias promised.

Rachel laughed a little with the others as Jake muttered, “Speak for yourself.”

A crescent of light opened and then grew into a full circle, a yawning white emptiness into the ship, before he appeared. 

Elfangor. 

Blue fur. Four eyes, two of them on stalks. Vertical slits on the face, but no mouth. Two arms with too many fingers, and a body like that of a small horse or maybe a deer with four legs and a long, muscular tail. The blade at the end of it, wickedly sharp and curved almost like a scorpion. 

An andalite. 

The others were gasping, noises of surprise and shock leaving them, but Rachel could only stare. She took it all in, every familiar memory, and was only a little surprised that her mental image of him had been off, changed by Ax and how long she’d known him. Elfangor in the flesh was bigger, his face wider, his cheekbones defined. He was clearly an adult, and the Ax of her memory was even more clearly a kid, like them. She wondered if Ax was on the Earth now too, if his domeship had crashed down into the ocean already, if he was already mourning the only family he had anywhere in this galaxy. 

Rachel’s jaw clenched at the thought. She had hopes for tonight. Plans for tonight, she might even go so far as to say. 

“Hello,” Tobias said, the first of them all once again, gentle, and they followed suite, Elfangor, the rest of them, exchanging greetings as if this were normal and then - 

Elfangor staggered. He fell to the ground, and Rachel ran forward with Tobias to try and help him up. His fur was soft under her hands and his skin was burning hot. Fever, maybe. 

She remembered this part. 

<I will die. The wound is fatal.>

Things happened very quickly after that. Rachel was still caught on the word fatal as Elfangor explained the threat, the invasion, sent Jake into the ship after the blue box, and before she knew it, all of them were pressing their hands to the box. Were feeling the strange-but-not-painful sensation of the morphing power flowing into their bodies. Were learning of the threat.

Were feeling Elfangor’s pain, and his sadness. 

He was dying, alone even in the center of them, here on Earth lightyears away from his family, and he was resigned to it, and Rachel - 

Rachel was not.

"Then, then you should morph! If that box gave us this power then why can't you do it? Why can't you run away from here?!" Rachel demanded, stepping forward as if to - to do something, she wasn't sure yet but she was going to do _something_ okay, there had to be something, why was she here in the past doing all of this again if it wasn't so she could do _something_? 

<No.> It was a single word and utterly final. Not serene but close to it. Calm, in a way that made the hairs on her back stand up. It was too familiar, that acceptance. 

( At the end, hadn't she stood still for the final blow? )

She couldn't speak. She couldn't just let this happen. She had to try. She didn't know why he wouldn't at least try it. 

Luckily, she wasn't the only one there. The other Animorphs might not have known what was going on, might not have even believed it was true, not yet, but they were still there, and if there was one thing she could count on her friends to do - 

“It’s total bull, all of it - aliens, a magic box, an invasion - this is probably some stupid TV show and we’re about to get punked,” Marco said, talking fast. He was closest to Jake, and he backed further away with every word, shaking his head. No surprise there - he’d always been the most skeptical, every step of the way. Cynical, too. She couldn’t blame him for that. The war had hit everyone hard, but Marco was like Tobias. He didn’t know it yet, but he was in it deeper than bone. Down to the blood. He looked all around them, squinting to see deeper into the construction site. “Where’s the cameras?”

“You can’t be serious,” Tobias said, disbelieving. “There’s a real life alien dying in front of us and you think it’s reality TV?”

“If it’s real then prove it!”

<Is my existence not itself proof?> Elfangor asked. He was smiling with his eyes, in that andalite way Ax had first shown them, the one where being without a mouth wasn’t a hindrance. <It would do be no good to morph now, children.>

“Why not?” Cassie asked, stepping closer. Concern was written all over her face and her hands were twitching, like she was trying to hold herself back from reaching out to try and help him. She probably was - Cassie had been helping her dad with the animals in their barn for years, and a little thing like Elfangor being an alien wasn’t going to change the fact that she wanted to help. “Couldn’t you escape if you changed into an animal?”

There were lights in the sky, slowly getting closer. Scanning. Bugfighters for sure. They were running out of time.

“You have to try,” Rachel insisted, stepping closer.

Jake reached out. He put a hand on her shoulder. It was shaking. He was looking at the sky too and even if he didn’t understand what was happening -

“If you can get out of here, then you should. But you guys - there’s more ships coming.” 

<Yeerks.> Elfangor said, and his hatred burned in her blood. She saw the others squirm. She saw Marco’s face pale. <There is no time.>

“Then you should run too!” She couldn’t just let him die again. She had to try. She had to.

<I cannot ->

“Why not?!” Rachel yelled. 

“Rachel!” Cassie said, looking shocked, “Calm down! This isn’t the time to -”

“To what, freak out? He says he’s dying and he won’t even -” _Your son is alive_ , she wanted to scream. _So is your wife! They need you!_

<Were I to escape, Visser Three would raze your planet to the ground.> There was no exaggeration in those words. They made her still. They made all of them still, every eye going back to Elfangor, who knelt on the ground with his shoulders set and steady despite the burn spread over his side, despite the pain that had to be filling his body. She’d been burned. She knew how much it hurt. <This ship and this body both - he will destroy them.>

“Visser Three?” She heard Marco repeat, confused. He didn’t know what the word meant. None of them did. She wasn’t supposed to either. 

<He is the most deadly of your enemies. Of all yeerks, he is the only one with the power to morph. If I am dead, he will think all of my people on this planet destroyed and the yeerk invasion will continue as planned. But if I escape ->

He did not have to say more. They got it.

_Rachel_ got it. 

She was sick to her stomach. She wondered if Elfangor had thought of that too, the first time. She wondered if he’d died, if he’d been _eaten_ , thinking about that fact, that he had to die or else humans would suffer and die and decided their lives were worth it.

“The blue box,” she said, voice shaking, for lack of anything better to say. “You said - if it gives people the power to morph, should we take it so they can’t get it?”

He stared at her, all four of his eyes focused on her, and she was afraid she’d said too much, afraid he would think her a controller, but then, his head dipped. His stalk eyes lowered. 

<A wise idea. Take it - and then hide, children. You must not be found here. There is no time.>

There really wasn’t. In the end, they barely managed to hide in time, huddled together behind a stack of rusting construction supplies, as the yeerks came. Hork-bajir controllers and taxxons and worst of all - Visser Three. They listened, shaking with fear (and rage, in Rachel’s case, always rage, even if it was a toothless rage now). She had the morphing power, but she didn’t have a morph. There wasn’t anything she could do to stop this. The only thing that kept her from feeling utterly powerless was the box, cool in her arms. 

A tangible change. Proof this wasn’t just just a nightmare. 

Elfangor fought back. She hadn’t remembered that, and she didn’t know if it was because of what they’d said or if he was just getting in what he could before the end, but Visser Three’s howl of pain echoed in her mind and satisfied at least some of that furious, snarling beast that was her rage. 

Visser Three morphed into a monster and somehow the worst thing was that that _wasn’t_ the worst thing she’d ever seen, those horrible tentacles of his wrapping around Elfangor’s neck and lifting him into the air. At her side, Cassie was shaking and crying, whispering, over and over again,“No, no, no, no…” 

Rachel put an arm over her shoulder, pulled her close. With her other hand, she grasped Tobias’ and pulled him in too. “Don’t look.”

She didn’t take her own advice. Tears poured down her face, but she looked, staring out from their hiding place. Elfangor was dying for them again, even if he didn’t know he’d done it once before. It felt like the least she could do was watch.

She didn’t expect Jake to jump up, to yell and she turned in horror but Marco was already slapping a hand over his mouth and pulling him back, Cassie was already whispering reprimands, and Visser Three’s monstrous noises were too loud. They hadn’t been heard. 

Thank G-d, they hadn’t been heard. 

It happened, then. 

Elfangor died. Visser Three killed him. _Ate_ him. 

The scream echoed in her mind. The despair, the fear, impossible to hide at the end. 

Marco threw up and there was nothing to distract the controllers from the noise. Voices split the air, weapons were grabbed, and they ran, splitting up into any and every direction away from the construction site that they could charge a straight line down. Rachel slowed just long enough to be sure more of the controllers would be chasing her instead of someone slower, like Cassie, or who lived close to the construction site like Tobias, and then ran, grabbing Jake by the hand and to be sure that this time he didn’t trip, he didn’t fall, and that they ran and ran and ran _together_ until the fact that they lived on different streets meant they had to split apart to get home. 

The blue box burned against her side the whole way.


	2. Chapter 2

Rachel morphed for the first time the next day. It would have been sooner, but her mom was worried and there was the box to try and hide away. She didn’t have any pets at home but she’d never been afraid of bugs and being friends with Cassie - and being an Animorph - had taught her that they were everywhere, always. Even, especially, when you thought they weren’t around. 

This time around, her first morph was a fly, skin shrinking and tightening, the splish-splosh feeling of her organs liquefying, shifting about inside of her without pain. Her bones vanishing, her mass vanishing, her hair splitting - some strands becoming antennae and others the fine, hairlike structures that covered her exoskeleton - gross, but familiar. What was unfamiliar was the way the acquiring of the was easier than the morph itself, the way her body almost seemed to resist the changes. She’d forgotten how _slow_ it was at first - without even noticing, she’d become better and better with practice. Never as fast as Cassie, but much faster than she was now.

But it worked and that was the important part. Morphing worked, and she could show Cassie - not that Cassie was going to be a hard-sell, not when Rachel could remember clearly how willing she’d been to morph the first time, experiencing the power and grace of a horse for herself. But the point was, she could show Cassie. She could talk to her and then she could somehow, some way convince her of the whole thing. Not just the morphing or the aliens, but the time travel. 

Was it time travel if you died first? Rachel still wasn’t sure.

<I’m stalling,> she admitted to herself grumpily, buzzing around her room in wild jets and bursts. Her clothes were in a pile on the side of her bed. Her body was a fly’s, and she was getting used to the fly instincts. That at least, was still familiar; maybe because it was something to do with her brain and her memories which were still the same instead of her body, which was thirteen all over again. 

And still she was stalling, poking at theories about morphing instead of doing what needed to be done. It was cowardly and Rachel was no coward. 

She went to find Cassie.

After demorphing, of course, riding off on her bike after a quick shout to her mom, gone before she could hear any complaints. 

She had decided to tell Cassie first for a few reasons, the most important being that Cassie was both her best friend and the person most likely to believe her about all of this. The next was that _as_ the person most likely to believe her, Cassie was also the only person she could trust to tell her how to break it to everyone else - Rachel's gut told her was that spitting out the truth in front of everyone without a plan the way she was about to do to Cassie would go horribly wrong. 

She was ninety percent positive about that. 

Horribly wrong meaning the others were going to think she was crazy and also a controller and then they'd -

They wouldn't kill her. They weren't hardened enough for that, not yet. Not like her. The thought was enough to make her gut clench and her hands tighten on the handlebars of her bike. Rachel had killed her own cousin. She'd made sure he was free in death the way he wasn't in life and she'd done it because Cassie had made sure Jake wouldn't have to, by screwing them all over. 

Her bike jerked as she ran over something that crunched and _cracked_ like breaking bone and Rachel jerked, looking back. It was a pinecone. Just a pinecone. 

She'd been so lost in thought she hadn't noticed herself going off road, from the paved streets to the dirt roads by Cassie's barn. Why would she? The path was so familiar she could - apparently - get there in her sleep. 

The barn that Cassie's dad had made into the Wildlife Rehabilitation Clinic stood ahead, looking exactly the way it had all their lives. It was almost as familiar to herself as her own house, with all the time she and the other Animorphs had spent gathered there, and all the time she and Cassie had spent inside it before, hanging out, looking at the animals recovering from their injuries. 

Rachel swallowed and parked her bike by the side of it. 

The barn doors were open and the first thing she saw when she walked in was Cassie, staring at the row of cages full of rehabilitating animals. There was a hawk in there, one that Rachel would never mistake for another, the sight of which made her heart skip a beat. Cassie hadn’t noticed her entrance; Rachel could guess what she was thinking. 

“Wondering what to try first?” She asked knowingly. 

Cassie jumped and turned to face her. Her brown eyes were wide with surprise - she had been completely absorbed in her thoughts and thus been caught off guard. A part of Rachel, the part that had helped keep her going through three years of this war, scoffed. An Animorph couldn't afford to lose track of their surroundings like that. “Rachel! When did you get - have you tried it already?”

The most important question of course, beyond even _when did you get here._ The last time, Cassie had tried a horse morph first, but she'd already acquired the DNA before Rachel could arrive. This time around she must have come before Cassie could finally make up her mind to try it out.

“A _fly_?” Cassie demanded in the meantime. Her face was disbelieving, brows raised, lips parted. “You picked a fly for your first morph?”

“It’s not like I have any pets I could acquire,” Rachel reminded her, before adding. “And besides, being a fly is useful for spying on Controllers.”

The words were uttered casually and fell like crashing stones - no, like Tobias diving at the enemy, the impact so stunning that for the first seconds it couldn't be properly understood. Rachel had tried and tried for days now to figure out the best way to bring up the truth and none of her ideas sounded good. In the end she'd fallen back on the blunt truth of it. 

"You… why are you saying it like that?" Cassie asked. The expressions on her face were changing, confusion to wariness to surprise to trust to doubt, as though someone were rapidly changing the channel on the TV of her emotions. "'Being a fly _is_ useful for spying', that andalite -"

"Elfangor," Rachel corrected.

"He only told us about them last night. We only got the power _last night_." Fear had apparently won out - Cassie took another step back, deeper into the barn. "Rachel, you aren't -"

She was so young. The words were the only reasonable assumption, but she couldn't spit them out.

Rachel couldn't remember the last time she was that innocent. That carefree. Intellectually, she knew it must have been when this time was real for her, the way it was real for Cassie and all the others, but the person she'd been - the Rachel who's biggest concerns really _were_ getting to her gymnastics meets and her parent's divorce and maintaining her perfect grade point average - that person didn't feel real. She felt like an old skin, shed a long time ago. Two different people. Xena, before and after Ares. 

Utter irreconcilable.

"I'm not a controller," she agreed, "And I don't have proof that could make you believe me, except that it would make me a pretty stupid yeerk to help you all get away and then blow my cover a day later, right?"

Cassie swallowed. "Right. But -"

"Elfangor told us the truth last night. And he told us the truth three years ago."

"That doesn't make sense. _You're not making sense Rachel_."

Fear in her voice, straining her throat, giving the words an almost vibrating growl. That couldn't be the echo of her wolf morph, not when Cassie hadn't acquired it yet, but…

Rachel's head was messing with her. She continued on, staring Cassie down, never once looking away.

"Y2K didn't happen either. You know, end of the world, planes falling out of the sky, every computer all jacked up - I mean. The world ended, but it wasn't because of Y2K. It was just the yeerks, and us."

They were alone in the barn, except for the animals, the horses chewing at hay and swishing their tails to shoo away flies, the hawk with the broken wing eyeing them warily, the other caged animals ignoring them. They were wild animals. They didn't care about yeerks or war or time travel or human problems at all. The most they cared about was that they hurt or they were hungry. The idea of the future or the past, or invasions and distant threats - none of that mattered to them.

Rachel was more than a little envious of them.

"I'm from the future Cassie. Except… it's not like Back to the Future. I don't have a car to take me back. I don't even think there is a back," she admitted, breaking into a hollow laugh. "I need you to believe me. I know it sounds crazy - I'm the one who was there and I still wish I was making it up instead. But I've been wracking my brains all week trying to think of a way to say this that wasn't stupid or crazy and this is the best I've got."

There was a long moment of silence, one that Rachel refused to fill with her own anxiety. She'd been through worse than awkward silence. She'd once beaten a Controller to death with her own arm, the arm _he'd_ made her lose. The suffocating silence of the barn was nothing.

But Cassie was being quiet for… an awfully long time, her face still and blank. Couldn't she at least say something?

But she didn't. She just kept staring and staring until all at once her legs just went out from under her and she sank to the ground, arms held out so her hands hit the straw and dirt tossed ground and held her up. 

Rachel swallowed. 

"Cassie?"

"How do I know you're not one of those things, playing some kind of trick or -"

"Because it would be really, really stupid of me," Rachel said. In spite of everything, her voice was gentle. She sank into a crouch, so at least she didn't have to keep staring down at her friend. "And the yeerks might not be the brightest bunch, but they know better than that."

A shudder rolled through Cassie's body, starting in her shoulders and going all the way down. The strain in her voice had only increased, every word a lesson in tension.

"And how long does this whole thing go on, for you to say that so easily?"

"Three years," Rachel said honestly. Flatly. There was no battle confidence, no _let's do it_ surety in her voice. She didn't even try to force it. "Three years and it was finally - maybe - at an end. I don't know if we won."

This at least was enough to earn a choked, startled laugh. 

"If," Cassie echoed and then stopped. Rachel watched her shake off the last of her outburst, sucking in lungfuls of air, and hoped she hadn't broken her. "If we were winning the war, why would you come back?"

That...

...wasn't one of the questions Rachel was ready for. 

"You're taking this better than I thought," she said instead of answering. "You believe me alrea-"

"Rachel." It was and wasn't Cassie's serious voice, a prototype version compared to the one she was so familiar with now, a voice that asked you to listen instead of told you to. "Last night we saw an alien turn into another kind of alien so he could _eat_ the first - so he could eat Elfangor."

Her voice broke before she could say _the first alien_ , horror and grief forcing out the right and proper name instead. 

Rachel kept her mouth shut. 

"We ran for our lives because more aliens wanted to kill us. _I turned into a horse this morning_. I don't - it is crazy. But really not that much crazier than everything else. Just tell me."

And she looked up. Her dark brown eyes were nervous and scared but they held Rachel's gaze. 

"What happened to make you come back without any of us?"

0000000

Cassie believed her. 

She also threw up, hanging onto a bucket while Rachel tentatively patted her heaving back and shoulders. She cried too, and that was worse. At least they'd all thrown up during the war, thrown up because of the violence and the bloody gore that wasn't anything like a movie or a surgery, thrown up because of morphs that were horrible and disgusting and awful, white bone and slick pink muscle and flesh warping and jarring and shifting under and over skin. Throwing up was gross and disgusting and made your throat burn and your mouth sour but it was normal. 

Crying wasn't. Maybe it had been in the beginning, but it wasn't in the now that Rachel was familiar with, the one she came from, and it twisted her guts to see Cassie cry so openly, great big sobs that shook her shoulders and back and had tears running down her face, tears and snot that she wiped and wiped away. Rachel had an awful feeling the tears were for her. That they were as much because Rachel herself wasn't and wouldn't cry as they were at the situation. 

“You _died_ ,” Cassie rasped, before her head dropped and she was heaving again miserably. Liquid trickled into the bucket in wet bursts and plops. There probably wasn’t anything solid left in her stomach. “You came back because you _died_ . We fought a war and killed people and you _died_ and now you have to do it again -"

Apparently there was something left in her stomach, because down went her head and up went those contents, up and then down to spatter in the bowl. 

Rachel kept rubbing her back through it all. Maybe to someone else it would have been weird, that Rachel was the one who'd actually lived through this war but Cassie was the one crying over it, but she was grateful. She had cried for Elfangor - they had _all_ cried for Elfangor - but she had a feeling in the pit of her stomach that if she cried for herself now, she might never stop crying. 

So instead, she pointed out, "We're all doing it again."

And when Cassie was again done heaving, she pushed the bucket away and slumped to the ground. She shook her head, which hung low, and disagreed. "No we're not. Jake, Marco, Tobias and I… we're all doing this for the first time. You're the one who remembers what it was like. You're the one who's having to do this twice."

"...yeah, well, I think I got the better end of the deal. At least none of it's new to me."

There was quiet after that, the two of them going through motions that were all too familiar to Rachel and unfamiliar to Cassie; dumping the contents of the bucket and filling it with sand to suck away the worst of the moisture that was left; grabbing water from the stack of bottles Cassie's dad kept in the corner of the barn to wash away the taste of vomit; cutting loose a bit of alfalfa hay to spread the sweet, grass scent through the bar and chase away the sour odor.

It was easy, maybe too easy after everything that had happened ( would happen? ) and been said, but Rachel didn't question it, the way she didn't question a lot of things. That wasn't how she was wired and she'd had a long, long war to get used to that fact. The barn felt comfortable. The barn felt safe. _Cassie_ felt safe. 

She'd missed that. 

( There hadn't actually been that much time between Cassie giving away the blue box and Rachel boarding the blade ship. Those hours, every last one of them, had felt like a year, all her anger and frustration boiling under her skin like claws, like fangs, barely constrained violence begging for release. She hadn't been able to look at Cassie without wanting -

Well.

Being able to share a space with her now, without that rage - 

She'd missed that. )

"I don't know if it's a good idea to tell everyone everything at once," Cassie said, some forty-five, fifty minutes later. There wasn't a clock in the barn, but Rachel knew. She'd gotten very, very used to guessing the time. She might not have been Ax accurate about keeping track of 'her Earth minutes', but she was pretty good. 

"Why?" Simple, straight to the point. No judgement in the word, or at least, she tried not to put any in it. A frown crawled over her face in spite of her best efforts. 

But she'd told Cassie first because she trusted her - trusted her to believe her, but also to figure out how to make everyone else believe her too. That trust had to start somewhere. 

"Because it's too much and Marco will definitely walk out on us before we get halfway through," was Cassie's blunt, matter-of-fact assessment. "We have to start with the most important details. You came from the future. You lived through the war. His mom's alive."

There was a quiet sense of disbelief in those last three words. Rachel didn't blame her. Marco's mom dying had been the kind of thing no one would shut up about at school for at least a week, whispering at lunch and in the halls and staring, because someone disappearing at sea in a random boating accident was the kind of tragedy some people couldn't shut up about, because it felt like something out of a soap opera instead of real life. She still remembered her mom and dad whispering about it, shaking their heads.

That had been two years ago. Time passed, people stopped talking about it. Her parents had a divorce, and she had other things to worry about. But Marco was Jake's best friend the way Cassie was hers. Even if they weren't all that close, they were in the same orbit. She'd had an idea of the way Marco's dad had fallen apart after Eva died, and the way it had made Marco fall apart too, before he had to put himself back together. The idea of telling him that Eva was alive and would be back...

Rachel had lived beside that woman in the hork-bajir valley, been captured by her when there was still a yeerk in her head and fought against her traps, and there was a part of her that _still_ didn't always believe it. She didn't know how Marco could stand it.

She didn't know how he _would_ stand it, when she told him soon, without any evidence but her word and memories he didn't share. 

"He's going to lose it," she grimaced. It wasn't a disagreement. "But I kinda figured."

"Jake's not going to know why he should be the leader either, not when you're the one who's been here, done this."

Oh no. That, at least, was a can of worms she wasn't going to open.

"Because I'm bad at it," Rachel said firmly, "And I know it and you guys don't need to know it. And this is _not_ a confidence thing, it's a 'we tried that and it was _not_ a good idea' thing. Jake's the leader."

0000000

The first thing Rachel does is make sure Cassie isn’t anywhere near a morph when the others arrive, and the second thing she does is make sure that the barn doors are shut tight.

No controller-cops kidnapping Cassie and dragging her to the Yeerk Pool. No Tobias, forgotten and trapped and _stuck_ as a nothlit, only given the power to have anything _resembling_ a human life because the Ellimist needed a favor.

Rachel’s never forgotten that night. It’s played out in more nightmares than she cares to count, all the ways that everything could have gone even worse, how they could have succeeded in dunking Cassie’s head and making her a controller; how Visser Three could have killed them in that chase up endless stairs; how Tobias could have been killed instead of just trapped - 

Those worst-case scenarios were the only nightmares worse than the actual memories. The moans and weeping of the involuntary controllers; the laughter of the voluntaries, laughing as if they couldn’t hear any of it; the screams of her friends as they were burned and shot and cut, as they all tried to escape, in over their heads beyond what they could have imagined - 

Jake’s roar, as they were forced to leave Tom beyond. 

Her hands shake a little as she double checks the lock. No. None of that. 

Behind her, the others were talking.

“But this is a total lie,” Jake was saying, confused and upset. Rachel didn’t know what he was talking about, but she wasn’t surprised to see a newspaper in his hand when she turned to the rest of them. 

“Ding ding ding ding! Correct answer. Johnny, tell our contestant what he’s won,” Marco sneered, and then, “Keep reading.”

Jake looked down at the newspaper, his eyes tracking over the lines of print. “They’re looking for us. But - why would the police lie?”

Had she been that naive too?

But to Jake’s credit, there was an awareness creeping into his voice, even as he questioned the obvious. 

Marco answered anyway, a sardonic laugh curling his lips. “Let’s see Captain Obvious… would it be that the cops are controllers?”

“Probably not all the cops,” Tobias pointed out, his brows pinched. It was strange to see him with expression on his face, emotion in more than his eyes. 

“Even one is enough of them,” Rachel said flatly, deciding this was probably the best chance she would have to interrupt. “And we don’t have any way to tell who’s a controller and who’s not. Our teachers. The government. People in the newspapers and on TV - we can’t trust anyone but us.”

“Never did trust math teachers,” Marco joked, a nervous edge to his smile. 

They laughed - everyone but Rachel, anyway. She waited until it dissipated.

“Maybe,” and the laughter hadn’t exactly brought a sense of levity to the room, but her voice killed the mood anyway. “It doesn’t matter though. You guys, I’m not kidding. We’re the only people we can be sure aren’t controllers.”

Even Cassie started, and she was the only other person in the room who knew exactly where Rachel was coming from. There was a resigned sort of acceptance on Tobias’ face, as if what she was saying only made sense to him. But Jake looked shocked, and Marco -

“You’re saying that like we’re about to do something about this,” Marco said, a hint of something like laugh, _come on, laugh and prove this is a joke_ in his eyes. “We don’t have to do anything about this. We can just forget about all of this. We never talk about it. We never morph. We just deal with our own lives.”

Tobias looked to Jake. Rachel didn’t remember most of this part, so she didn’t know what Jake would have said. She did know what she had to say.

“Look, this is going to sound crazy but -”

“Don’t worry about sounding crazy! I already think you’re crazy if you think we’re going to do anything about this! You saw the andalite! He was killed trying to stop these guys and he was an alien with a spaceship and a knife on a _tail_ because he was an alien! This is real! This is radical stuff Rachel, this isn’t some episode of Xena Warrior Princess, we could all get killed just like him! You wanna get eaten? I sure don’t want to get eaten!”

Well. She’d never thought it would be _easy_ to get Marco on board, but she’d managed to forget a little bit of how _annoying_ he was. Especially when he was right. 

The only reason she was getting this crazy second chance was because she _died_ after all. She couldn’t blame anyone (shouldn’t, really, she could, she _would_ blame anyone who walked away) who didn’t want to risk the same happening to them. But he was going to get over it, and she was going to _make_ him get over it. 

Cassie had said she should try to ease them all into it. Her voice had been calm and level as she said it too, almost as if she hadn’t spent five minutes kneeling over a bucket, vomiting and crying because ‘easing into it’ had been the last thing on Rachel’s mind. 

Rachel still felt a little guilty about that. 

“Do you want brain slugs to take over the planet if we don’t do something about it?” She challenged, a hand on her hip. 

“How do we even know they’ll really do that?” Marco snapped back, and then winced, raising up a hand. “Look, I think these yeerks are jerks too, but my dad - he won’t make it if something happens to me. He’s barely hanging on now.”

She knew that. She knew that, and she knew the only thing that had made Marco dig into the fight in the first place too, even if she’d only found out about _that_ after the fact. Eva’s name wasn’t exactly the kind of thing she wanted to just throw out like a holy hand grenade though, and just because it had to come out didn’t mean it had to be the _first_ thing to come out. 

“You think your dad will be any better if he ends up with a yeerk in his head?” 

Marco reeled back as if he’d been slapped, eyes wide, long hair swinging back with the motion. His cheeks darkened as an ugly flush spread over his face, and Rachel kept talking before he could throw out a retort. 

“The yeerks aren’t just something we can ignore. The yeerks are out there and they’re taking over people’s bodies and they’re manipulating people’s brains and if you think it’s something that’s just going to happen to other people and their families instead of ours -”

“I think Tom’s one of them,” Jake said, and Rachel went still. 

That wasn’t how it went. She knew that much. The first time they’d ever done any sort of mission had been at that beach trip for the Sharing. 

Jake didn’t believe Tom was one of them. He’d had to have it proven to him, the same way she had, but Tobias and Marco - they’d been the two most willing to believe it.

Now Marco stood as frozen as she did, his eyes wide, whites visible all around. Cassie flinched, because she already _knew_ , and Tobias’ lips were pressed into a thin, hard line, the most familiar expression she’d seen on him yet. 

“What?” Marco croaked, when none of them said anything. “Jake - Jake, what do you mean, you think Tom’s one of them?”

“He - smelled wrong. When I was Homer.”

Homer. 

She couldn’t remember the last time she’d sat down with Homer. 

“Homer your _dog_?” Marco asked shrilly. 

"No, Homer Simpson - of course Homer my dog," Jake snapped back, and Rachel was the only one who didn't draw back in surprise. It took her a moment to remember that the Jake who took control and who bit back when he had to was the Jake _she_ remembered, not the Jake they'd all known him as before, when he was her slightly dweebie, pretty alright, favorite-ish cousin who was kind of okay at basketball, kind of okay at school, kind of okay at life. 

( The war had made them and Rachel didn't know how to live without the war, didn't get the chance to. She hoped Jake had. She didn't know how time travel worked, but she hoped _her_ Jake, the Jake she'd gone through a war with and become an Animorph with and lost herself to the war with was alright out there somewhere, figuring out life without the war for both of them. )

Cassie looked to her, a brief glance she only barely noticed, less surprise and more understanding. Or maybe just realization. They hadn't exactly argued over Rachel's insistence that Jake be the leader, but she knew Cassie hadn't understood it. 

She didn't understand now either, no matter what she thought, but she would. 

"- gave us the power and I can prove it to you if you want," Jake was saying, holding up his hand as if in proof.

Marco snatched it and slapped it down, red faced, furious. Eyes wide with fear, voice creeping higher.

Tobias stepped back; Cassie stepped forward.

Marco spoke as if he didn't notice either, focused on Jake. "No I don't want you to prove it, I want you to all stop talking _crazy_! So what if we have the power? This isn't Captain Planet okay, our powers combined aren't going to save the world!"

"Yes they can," Rachel said. The words fell like stones from her lips, cutting the argument off as if they'd been shouted. 

They turned to her in fits and jerks, Jake in surprise and Marco in disbelief; Tobias with a kind of level-headed patience she still couldn't believe and Cassie with the kind of trust only years of friendship could make. 

Rachel swallowed. She'd never been afraid of being in the spotlight, not even on the balance beam that had once been her greatest enemy. 

"We can win the war if we do it together. We've already done it once."

Marco laughed. It was a mocking sound, bordering on hysterics, and it made her teeth set even as she understood where he was coming from, how crazy what she was saying sounded.

"'War'? 'We've already done it once'? Are you cracking up or something Rachel, because the only thing we've done is run like hell because _newsflash, five kids aren't going to win anything, let alone a war!_ "

 _Six kids_ , her mind spat back, and the idiocy of it made her want to laugh. Right. Because saying there was one more kid involved was going to make the difference. 

"Two weeks ago," she started instead, "It was June of 2000. We were figuring out what our last stand was going to be, because the yeerks had the morphing power and they had the president, and we were six kids hiding out in the hork-bajir valley with most of our parents and if we didn't figure it out we really would lose the war. We figured it out. We won."

She's pretty sure, anyway. No. No, she's sure. They won. She killed Tom and the yeerks killed her, but they won. 

They did. 

So they could, and they would, do it again. 

"I know that sounds crazy, but last night we saw Visser Three murder Elfangor and he gave us the morphing power. I _know_ you felt it. I _know_ you remember that, even if none of you remember the war I remember." Marco was shaking his head, shutting down, disbelieving, and she knew there was only one thing she could say. "Marco, your Mom's alive."

All hell broke loose.

0000000

"Again, not saying that I didn't deserve it," Rachel said some infinite amount of time (like twenty minutes, probably) later, poking her tongue against the inside of her swelling cheek and the oozing patch on her busted lip, "But that was an awful punch. I've got to teach you to do better than that. You probably hurt your hand more than you hurt my face."

"Rachel!" Jake hissed, appalled, while Marco snorted. That was what mattered - that he didn't sink into a bad place, that he kept that brain running and thinking and plotting. 

Besides, she meant it. A punch to the face wasn't all that much when you'd been shot with bullets _and_ lasers, cut with hork-bajir blades and animal claws, been bitten by taxxons and torn apart all sorts of ways, and even with all that, the punch that had connected with her cheek had still been _exceptionally_ bad. It didn't matter if a gorilla had hundreds of extra pounds on it. If Marco ended up with that as a battle morph again, she was making sure he could throw a solid punch. 

"You didn't deserve it," Tobias insisted, a touch of venom in his voice as he glared at Marco. It wasn't the first time he'd said that and she'd ended up having to drag _him_ away from Marco after the two of them had gone to the ground, rolling in the dirt in a pile of flailing limbs and curses. 

( She really shouldn't have been surprised Marco could cuss like that, but wow. Who knew the choir boy had it in him? )

He was wrong, but the fact that he was trying to defend her - Rachel had never wanted to be swept off her feet, to be rescued, to be _saved_ , but she had wanted a partner. Someone who got her, someone who met her step for step and Tobias was that. Tobias was it, maybe, probably, honestly. 

( _Help me_ , she'd begged him, and he hadn't understood until he did, and he _had_. He'd helped her finish the mission. He'd been her eyes, the way he'd been all of their eyes for so long, and she'd killed Tom because of that. She'd set her cousin _free_ because of that. 

She hadn't died for nothing, because of that.

The yeerk had waited for her to morph human before it killed her. The hesitation had made sure _Tobias_ was human before it killed her. 

Those steel blue eyes that had once been so dreamy were the last thing she saw and that was -

there were worse things to see at the end.)

"I really did," she said honestly, meeting those eyes, "And it'll be gone the second I morph anyway. I knew bringing up Eva would be going nuclear when I did it."

Her eyes might have been on Tobias but she didn't pretend not to see Marco flinch. Neither did anyone else, though Cassie was the one to reach out, a hand to his shoulder that was quickly shrugged off for her trouble. 

"I needed you to believe me. I _need_ you all to believe me, because we won this war once, and we’ll do it better this time.”

“Because you came back from the future,” Marco said, the lack of sarcasm making her twitch. “You know, because we did such a bang up job of things that you died.”

“Five out of six of us making it out means we scored a B. That’s higher than Jake’s GPA,” she shot back.

Jake winced theatrically, over-dramatic, and the rest of them laughed - nervous, shaky laughs, punched out like a shocked exhale, but laughter nonetheless. She would have felt bad, except for the smile she could see hidden in the corners of his mouth. “Gee, thanks Rachel. Nothing like being collateral damage.”

She cracked a smile of her own, unrepentant. They could do this. They would do this. 

“Should we start writing this down?” Cassie asked, a frown knitting her brows. “I don’t know where we’d hide it that we could be sure no one would find it though…”

“That’s too risky,” Marco said immediately, shaking his head as he shot Cassie down. “Maybe our parents - most of our parents are free but - Tom -”

His voice faltered. The name hung in the air and Jake’s fists clenched, but he stayed silent for the moment, not pushing, and Rachel was grateful because she didn’t know what to say, not when a part of her wanted to find her cousin and free him now, damn the consequences, and the rest had lived the consequences, not when his blood was once the last thing she’d ever tasted, not when her ears still rung with the order, the mission, the job she could do that no one else could, that no one else would allow, the last grace she could offer, not when she couldn’t imagine telling Jake, this Jake who hadn’t yet lost his softness that he’d been the one to ask her to kill his brother. 

She said nothing. 

Marco continued. “You’ve seen like, even a single episode of anything with a time travel episode? The second you make one change you break the whole time stream down and once that happens? Boom, future knowledge useless. Eighty percent useless, maybe… Have you changed anything besides you know, _telling_ us?”

Four pairs of eyes swung to Rachel, and she shifted on her feet. Her cheek throbbed and it felt less like pain and more like warning. Her lips pulled back, less a smile and more a grimace, a baring of teeth more fit to the bear growing wary of tension. 

“So. Two things,” she started, looking from Marco to Jake, holding her cousin’s gaze. “First, you remember how I took the Escafil device from Elfangor -”

Confusion flooded their newly cautious faces. Jake asked the question.

“The what device?” 

And Rachel had to bite down on the urge to roll her eyes, reminding herself that Elfangor had never actually given them the name of the box, that she knew it because of one too many conversations with Ax, always one part lecture, one part planning, third part venting. 

“The blue box - the one that gave us the morphing power. That’s the only thing that will make real changes… for now. When we did this the first time, none of us were thinking about taking it with us, and that made a _lot_ of problems down the line -”

David. The old hate was curdled now, shot through with pity like mold, for the wreck he’d been at the end, never mind all he’d done, all he’d said, never mind that she didn’t regret any of it, save not killing him sooner. She wouldn’t ever like him, but taking the box now had probably saved his life on top of removing one more threat. 

“For now?” Marco asked, eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Are you planning on changing something else already?”

“Where did you hide the box?” was Tobias’ question instead, his eyes lit with curiosity. She pretended not to notice the dour look he threw Marco’s way. 

The third question came from Jake, overlapping with the other two. “What’s the other thing?” 

Cassie was the only one to say stay silent, hands twisting in her lap. She didn’t have to ask. She’d already heard it all.

Rachel took a deep breath. They were good questions. They were real questions. She just…

“I hid the box in my room, in pieces - no I didn’t break it, it comes apart, Ax showed us how to do it - and I have an idea of a better place we can hide it, but it’ll take time. There’s a _lot_ I’m planning on changing, because there’s a lot of mistakes we don’t have to make, this time. And. The other thing is… and I can’t believe _I’m_ saying we can’t be reckless, is this how all the rest of you always felt -”

She was just buying time and she knew it, the rest of them staring, and Jake, Jake especially staring, intent.

“I know where the Yeerk Pool is. Where they go when they leave their hosts, and where they keep the hosts when they’re freed.”


	3. Chapter 3

“ _You know where their base is?_ Why didn’t you start with that? We can go there and bust Tom out now -” The words burst out of Jake like he was a soda bottle some idiot had shaken up and left for a poor sap to find.

Rachel really didn’t like being the poor sap in that simile. 

“No, we can’t,” she said firmly, one fist clenched. There was desperation in Jake’s voice, desperation she was too familiar with, and being the person to cut him down instead of back him up felt horribly, horribly wrong, but - “The yeerks only have to go back to the pool every three days, and we don’t know when he’ll be there. We have school, we can’t just stake out the high school and follow Tom everywhere to find out when he’s planning on going.”

“‘We have school’?” Jake echoed incredulously. “Forget about school! They have _Tom_ , Rachel, what does school have to do with anything? Forget school! That’s my brother! That’s your _cousin_ -”

Maybe this was some kind of karma, years of making Jake mediate between her and Marco and Cassie coming back to bite her now. 

Maybe it was what she deserved.

Didn’t mean she didn’t hate it. Or that she didn’t still taste Tom’s blood in her mouth, flooding the back of her throat. 

“What are we going to do with him Jake?” She forced the words out as calmly as she could, keeping her voice low and controlled. There was a bite to every terse word regardless, an edge she couldn’t stop, that had Marco and Tobias and Cassie staring at her, all of them soft and surprised and confused, even Cassie who knew everything Rachel had been able to tell her. A part of her wondered if she was scaring them. 

A part of her wondered how she’d managed a week before she started scaring them. Her body might have been thirteen but she wasn’t, and the person she’d been back then - 

“Okay, we go to the yeerk pool. Somehow, we don’t get ourselves killed getting in, somehow we find Tom and get him out without getting ourselves killed in the escape, what do we do next? Where do we go from there? The yeerks know who Tom is. They know where he lives. They know about you, and Aunt Jean, and Uncle Steve, they probably know about _Homer_ , so Tom goes missing after the Andalite Bandits attack, what do you think they’re going to do? I can tell you what they aren’t going to do and that’s _ignore it_. So, best case scenario, you have to disappear. Tom has to disappear. Your parents, Homer, they all have to disappear. How are we going to do that? Think we can hide them in Cassie’s barn? Except wait -”

And she was breathing too hard, too fast, words coming out like a wave, a flood, a rockslide rumble that was too harsh. Jake was pale, pale like milk, pale like the few patches of white on the tiger’s body, the big cat that she thought of as more Jake than this kid, this _kid_ with his baby-round cheeks and soft eyes and hands, this kid who thought they could save Tom, this kid who wasn’t Jake anymore than this soft, short body was her, was Rachel. 

She laughed, and it was bitter, the newly hung mirror fallen to the earth, shattered to a thousand pieces before it could be enjoyed.

“Rachel,” Cassie started, her voice faltering, trying to interject. Her voice was soft, too soft. Her voice was kind, too kind. 

Kindness hadn’t won them the war though, had it?

Rachel didn’t stop.

“Except wait, see, because once _your_ whole family goes missing, where are they going to look next? They’re going to look at me, your cousin, the same age as you. They’re going to look at my family, and Chapman’s one of them, by the way, Chapman the Vice-Principal, and he’s going to remember that you and Marco? You and Marco are friends. And Cassie, Cassie’s my best friend. So that’s the four of us figured out, and our families all needing a place to hide at best, a place that we don’t have yet, or enslaved or _dead_ at worst, so yes Jake, Tom’s my cousin, and he’s your brother, and I hate that they have him but they _do_ have him. And getting him out isn’t as easy as killing that one yeerk.”

Her hands flexed, fingers clenching and releasing like balled fists, like claws posed to rip and tear, like something wild begging to be released and Jake was staring, he was staring, and there were tears in his eyes, and she hated herself. 

She hated herself for this. 

And she hated herself for being glad they’d locked the barn doors, because when Jake broke and ran for it, there wasn’t an easy way for him to get out. The harsh slam of his fist against the wood echoed.

“Jesus, Rachel,” Marco breathed, and she’d forgotten him for a moment, forgotten him entirely, “Okay. Okay, we get it, we’re fucked. Thanks for that, but weren’t _you_ the one saying we had to fight?”

“Yeah,” she muttered to herself, and then to him, louder, “Yeah, and we do. But as much as I hate it, we have to fight smart.”

“Is leaving Tom with them really the smart thing to do?” Tobias asked her. She lifted her head and he was staring at her, his eyes serious. They were harder than she thought they should be, closer to the eyes in her memory. His lips were pinched tight as he continued, “Maybe we don’t have any place for Tom to go but isn’t it just as dangerous for Jake to share a house with a yeerk?”

 _He did it for three years,_ she wanted to say, _there were two of them,_ she wanted to say. Two yeerks in Tom’s head, two yeerks in Jake’s house. One that they’d killed together, starved him out of Jake’s head, terror and rage and desperation fueling their every action, the knowledge that if that yeerk got out with Jake they were dead; the stress of keeping watch; learning the hard way that their greatest strength, the difficulty of keeping an Animorph prisoner was being turned against them. 

One that she’d killed herself, when she killed her cousin, when she hoped that Tom understood, that Tom agreed, that the free hork-bajir were right - that _live free or die_ was what he would want, because it was all she could offer him, the freedom of death. 

But those weren’t her battles to speak on, weren’t her victories, her fears. She’d lived three years knowing her cousin was a slave to the yeerk in his head, had lied to his face every time they’d met, every time their families had spent time together, but she didn’t live with him. She didn’t live with the threat in her house, every day, every night, didn’t have to worry that the nightmares that dogged her nights would give her away to the enemy, didn’t have to think thrice about every phone call, every late night out. 

They’d lied to their parents, all of them, and they’d gotten good at it, but none of them had had to practice as much as Jake.

The Jake who’d done that was gone though. The Jake who’d lived through the war, who’d lead them through the war, was gone. This Jake - 

He could do it. He could live through the war like she had, like _he_ had, and he could look Tom in the eye, and he could want him free, want to save him, want, want, want, until it boiled in his bones and died down to ash, until he would settle for wanting Tom dead. 

Did she really want that?

Did she?

No.

No, she didn’t. What was she doing, playing it safe, playing it cynical? Didn’t she say she would use this chance? Didn’t she say they were going to win this war?

Was it winning the war if she still lost her cousin? If she still lost both of them - one to the yeerks, one to herself, that specter of war that couldn’t see a way out that didn’t involve pain?

No.

No, it wasn’t. 

“You’re right,” Rachel said, quiet at first as realization built to the breaking point and crashed over her, a wave. She said it again, louder. “You’re right.”

There was a smile on Tobias’ face, when she looked at him again. Faint and worried, but there. She tried not to let it get to her.

The barn was big enough that even with the six of them gathered, five human kids and an andalite, cages and cages of animals, stalls of horses, it had never felt small, never felt cramped. Never even felt vulnerable, not with all the time they’d spent here, six kids who together were the worst enemy the yeerks had ever faced. That was true even now, with all the weight in the world on her shoulders and shuttered hope in her cousin’s eyes.

“Jake. Marco, Cassie, Tobias - forget everything I just said, alright? These last five minutes, they didn’t happen.”

“What?”

“Uh, no, they definitely happened -”

“Rachel -”

“Forget they happened,” she repeated, “Because Jake’s right. And maybe I was right a little, that it’s dangerous, but nothing we ever do is going to be safe again. And if we’re not going to fight for our friends - for our family - what’s the point of fighting at all?”

Maybe the feeling in her chest was hope, maybe it was something else, but whatever it was, it felt easier to breathe. Easier to stand. Easier to _be_. Something cramped given room to stretch.

She looked at Jake. He looked back at her, his face shuttered. Whiplash, probably. She couldn’t blame him.

“That’s what I was saying,” Marco grumbled, but when her gaze shot to him, sharp, he raised his hands in a gesture for peace. “I’m kidding. I’m _kidding_ , this is crazy, but - Tom’s one of them. My _mom_ is one of them. Of course I’m in.”

_I’m in._

How many times had she said that, and how many times had he groaned about it, joked about it, hated it?

“You know I’m in,” Jake voiced roughly. His eyes were shiny under the barn lights and he had to swallow before he could continue. “Thanks you guys.”

“I’m in too,” Tobias said, still looking at her. His gaze was penetrating - inquisitive, not yet fierce, but no less piercing than they’d been when he was the hawk. “Not just for Tom, or Marco’s mom, but for all of us. The Andalite - Elfangor - he gave us this power so we could use it to fight back.”

“That’s right,” Cassie agreed. She wasn’t looking at any of them, but at the animals in the barn, the one-eyed wildcat, the wolf with the broken leg, the red-tailed hawk that Rachel couldn’t quite look at. “And I know where we should start. If we’re going to fight, we need a little more than the Rehabilitation Clinic can offer us.”

She didn't know what she was feeling, not really, only that it was right. Realization, maybe. Awareness, definitely. Not quite anticipation - 

“Then let’s do this.”

0000000

Two hours, a few phone calls, and a bus ride later, they were in. The Gardens were and always had been a fantastical place, half theme park, half wildlife park, but it had been years since Rachel had been able to see this place as anything more than a DNA grocery store and today was no different. She had a ‘shopping’ list of hopefuls a mile wide, but there was one thing - and one thing only - that she knew she absolutely had to get on this trip. 

“The animals will go into a trance when we acquire them,” she reminded her friends as they made their way deeper into the park, taking the service pathways that visitors weren’t supposed to have access to. “Keyword _when._ We’re going to have to be fast and smart about this.”

“Smart, she says,” Marco snipped, “Smart, when we’re literally opening the cages at the zoo. Right, we’re worried about being smart.”

“Didn’t you say you were in?” Tobias asked, looking torn between amusement and irritation, like he wasn’t as nervous about this as the rest of them. 

“I never said I wouldn’t complain about it.”

“Well, complain a little quieter please,” Cassie hissed. She was leading them as they went and doing a bad job of playing it casual, nervous sweat dotting her forehead. “I can get away with being down here, sometimes, but if anyone spends more than a second looking our way we’re going to be in _big_ trouble.”

It would be hard for them to get into worse trouble than they were already in, what with the yeerks, the war, and their plan to walk themselves into the most useful cages in the zoo, but Rachel had a feeling that pointing that out would be the opposite of helpful. 

“We’re not going to get caught,” she asserted, confident, “And if we are - we’ll run. But we aren’t. We’re going to be just fine. I’ll go first, and from there, it’ll be a lot easier to get what we need.”

Because there were very few things in this zoo that a grizzly bear couldn’t intimidate, if not outright beat down in a fight, and Rachel had had experience fighting just about all of them. Sure, the gorilla she couldn’t see as anything but Marco’s battle morph might have been the smarter pick, what with the opposable thumbs, but the grizzly bear - 

Well. 

Rachel had history with that grizzly bear. 

“I hope you’re right Rachel,” Cassie said grimly, “Because we’re here. The back entrance to the grizzly exhibit.”

It was just a building at this side, grey, concrete mixed with grey bricks, a roof with metal siding. Nothing pretty or decorated about it. That was the thing about zoos and wildlife parks, Cassie had explained once, years ago, years that hadn’t yet happened yet. The places the visitors would see, those were decorated and set up to the nines, but the backstage - the places that only the staff could see - those were plain, ordinary. Simplicity was key, when you were working with creatures as dangerous as Mother Nature’s favorite children. 

It made navigating a zoo from the service side of things a lot harder, every entrance and exit looking just about the same. It would have been impossible to navigate from the ground without Cassie. 

“I still can’t believe your mom showed you all of this,” Jake said, and there was something sweet, something normal, about the appreciating glance he was giving Cassie. “You can really get us in there?”

“It’s a little late to be asking now, isn’t it?” Cassie asked, but the flash of her quick smile was teasing. She held up a keycard. “Bring your kid to work day is pretty incredible when your mom’s a veterinarian, and I’ve been coming here forever. But this is what’s going to get us in - and why we need to be quick. I’m hoping Doctor Tajiri is out today, but just in case he’s only working the night shift, I need to be sure to get this back before someone notices it’s missing.”

“Then let’s not waste anymore time,” Rachel nodded to the door of the building, squaring her shoulders. “Let’s move.”

Cassie stepped in front of her, swiping the keycard through a card reader beside the heavy steel door of the exhibit’s back staging room. It beeped, a light briefly shining a bright green, and there was the click of a lock disengaging. Cassie pulled the door open and the room yawned before them, only a few lights on. 

Rachel stepped in first. 

The zookeepers were smart people - the room wasn’t just, bam, instant bear habitat. There was space inside, space where food could be prepared and supplies stored, a refrigerator and freezer unit, a large table. 

There was also another door, this one with a glass panel. Through it she could see straw covered concrete, a few toys (enrichment items, she could practically hear Cassie correcting her), and the grizzly, curled up, already asleep.

Her grizzly.

“Are you sure about this Rachel?” Cassie asked, quiet. The key to this last barrier was in her hand, taken off the wall. “It’s not going to be easy to turn back once you’re in there.”

“There’s no turning back,” Rachel corrected, and found it within herself to smile. “I’m sure. Trust me. This bear? He and I have history. Open the door, Cassie. Let me in.”

No one knew better than she did how dangerous this was. How powerful that bear was. How much damage he could do to a human, who might as well have been built out of glued-together popsicle sticks compared to his seven foot bulk. Muscles piled on muscles. Claws like railroad spikes. Fur and bones as thick as armor. Nearly eight hundred pounds of one of Mother Nature’s greatest killing machines.

She knew what she was doing. Even if it took a swipe at her. Even if it bit her to pieces, as long as she could morph she could heal, and she already had a morph.

All she had to do was touch it. 

And when Cassie unlocked the door, and Rachel stepped forward, and the grizzly bear, in all his power and might and vicious capability opened dark eyes to stare at her and yet sat on unbothered - 

It felt like permission.

It felt like acceptance.

It felt like victory. 

“We’re going to win this war,” she told the bear, as her hand rested on its head, as its eyes closed as the tranquilizing feeling of being acquired took over. “And we’re going to start now.”

**Author's Note:**

> This prompt was actually for Rachel fixing things so that she and Tom live, the war ends happier, and events go much better for everyone involved, but my newfound inability to write anything short kicked in ( on top of 2020 kicking my ass), and I realized there wasn't a chance I was going to be able to do that in the planned 10k words. So I settled down to make this into a series and started outlining. I've mapped out most of the major events that will happen thanks to this prompt and while I'm not going to rewrite the entire series, this IS the first part of a series exploring some of the changes that will come about from Rachel's do over. 
> 
> Naturally, things won't turn out exactly as they did in the series, and the other kids will get to come out of this a Little Less Traumatized. My goal is to update this series throughout 2021 and showcase a series of events which change how the war is won.


End file.
